by Oliver Tidy
‘Is there someone that we can call for you?’
‘My sister lives in the town. She’s coming soon. What did he do? What did he mean, he’s sick?’
‘We have good reason to believe that Peter was involved in two serious sexual assaults.’
The remark stirred some life into her. ‘What? Sexual assault? Peter? No. No. I can’t believe that. He was a gentle boy. I can’t believe that.’
‘I really am very sorry,’ repeated Romney. ‘When we were here last night we recovered certain items that we have reason to believe were used in two recent serious sexual attacks in Dover.’ The woman’s lips moved, but no sound came out of her mouth. ‘Mrs Roper, the evidence against your son is very strong. But we think he wasn’t working alone. Did he have any close friends, any visitors to the house, anyone that he would meet up with?’ She shook her head. ‘Does the name Carl Park mean anything to you?’ Again she shook her head. ‘I do need to ask you one last question: your shed, is it normally kept locked?’ She looked at him as though he’d spoken a foreign language. ‘I’m sorry to ask, Mrs Roper, at a time like this, but it’s very important to our investigation and what we found in there last night.’
‘It’s never been locked,’ she said.
Before they left, Marsh forwarded the text message to her own phone. It was all that they had to suggest how Peter Roper came to be at the bottom of Dover cliffs. They left PC Welsh with Mrs Roper and headed back to the station.
‘What do you think now, Sergeant?’
‘It’s very convenient and tidy for Park. It could also be true.’
‘Is that still the devil’s advocate talking?’
‘I was thinking more of his solicitor, sir.’
‘Same thing, Sergeant. Same thing.’
*
Park’s duty solicitor had still not arrived. Romney and Marsh sought out the officer who Park had volunteered himself to.
‘How was he when he came in?’ said Romney. ‘What did he say?’
‘Looks tired, gov. I’ll give him that. Claimed to have been walking the streets all night, couldn’t sleep. Said he phoned his mother this morning and she told him we were looking for him and so he came in straight away. I asked him why he hadn’t had his phone on and he says he turns it off when he’s got things on his mind. Of course, he’s lying. He was no more walking the streets all night than I was. If he’d been out and about, he’d have been spotted by someone. Everyone was looking for them, stopping all possibles. He’d have also been wet. It snowed, sleeted and rained most of the night. Probably holed up somewhere out of the way and out of the weather.’
Romney needed to satisfy a curiosity. He asked which cell Park was being held in. Given the seriousness of the unfolding situation and Falkner’s warnings regarding procedure, he took Marsh and the duty sergeant with him. As the door to the room was unlocked and opened, Park raised himself up from where he’d been lying.
‘Morning, Carl,’ said Romney.
Park looked tired and drawn. He seemed to have retreated back into the Carl Park that Romney had encountered on the petrol station forecourt, listless and sullen. His alter-ego.
‘Why am I here?’ he said.
‘A few questions.’
‘I told you all I know yesterday.’
‘Things have changed since then,’ said Romney. ‘See you soon. We’re just waiting for the duty solicitor.’
The door closed as Park was saying something.
As they walked away, Romney said, ‘If he was up on the cliffs last night, he wasn’t in those shoes and probably not in those clothes.’
In the squad room messages awaited Romney’s attention. Forensics had confirmed officially that the cable ties recovered from the Roper’s shed were of the exact same type and brand as those used in the rapes. The hood that was recovered contained hairs that matched both rape victims. Marsh phoned down to request an urgent confirmation regarding whether the as yet unknown sample from the rape of Jane Goddard was a match with Peter Roper. Another message from the computer technician indicated that he had found things that were pertinent to the investigation. A third message from Falkner required an update as soon as was convenient. Both officers knew what that meant.
Romney threw back his coffee in preparation to go off and see the superintendent. Marsh would find out what the computer technician had uncovered. She was about to leave when a thought occurred to her, ‘Assuming that Park did push Roper off the cliff, how did he get him up there?’
‘From the moment Park left the station he knew that we were on to him. First thing he does is call Roper and tell him to get himself out of sight. Last thing he wants is us getting our hands on him.’ Romney thought for a moment as something registered. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘The cliff tops are close enough to be able to walk to and remote enough that anyone who wanted to keep out of the way and out of sight could disappear quite easily for a few hours, especially in this season when walkers are few and far between. Dotted along the top are ruined gun emplacements from the Second World War. They’re open to the elements, but some of them can still provide good shelter. You’ll often find a tramp dossing down up there in summer months. They would make a great place for Park to have told Roper to wait for him.’
‘OK, but how does he get him to the edge and off?’
‘We haven’t found the gun yet. Park turns up and starts waving a pistol about. He could get Roper to do anything, which, if it’s true, would also tell us that the gun is real. Roper wouldn’t be afraid of a fake.’
‘These emplacements, would they make good places to hide things?’
‘Like soiled clothing and muddy footwear?’
‘And a pistol. What about the text to Roper’s mother?’
‘Park gets Roper’s phone off him, sends him over the edge, sends the text to coincide with the time of death and then chucks it over the cliff after him.’
It was, they agreed, a perfect scenario for them, except for one thing: an absence of evidence.
A phone call informed them that the duty solicitor had arrived and was eager to get on with their interview with Park.
‘He can wait,’ said Romney. ‘See what downstairs have got and meet me in ten minutes.’
*
Falkner listened to Romney’s news with dismay, until the revelation of the text message received by Roper’s mother. Brightening, he said, ‘A suicide note, of sorts, and an admission of guilt. That tidies things up a little.’
‘Only if he sent the text and jumped,’ said Romney.
‘You don’t think that he did?’
‘I don’t like it, sir. It’s too convenient, too tidy.’
‘You have an alternative theory, I suppose.’
‘I think that Park knows a lot more than he is saying. He’s downstairs. His brief has just turned up. Do you think I could bring you up to speed after I’ve interviewed him?’
‘All right, Tom. Whatever you think is best.’
*
Marsh was waiting for him outside the interview room.
‘Ready?’ he said.
Her grim expression indicated the opposite. ‘I think that you should see what’s turned up on the hard drives of their computers before we speak to Park, sir.’
Romney followed her down a flight of stairs and along a dimly lit corridor where, in the bowels of the station, the in-house computer technician laboured away in his lair. His department, a windowless room, was mainly given over to workbenches lit by portable spotlights on which were strewn the insides of several computers. His job it was to keep the station’s computer and communication systems working to optimum capacity at all times. For one man it was proving a full-time job. As well as this, he was also increasingly employed in the fight against crime in the area. The technological age and the explosion of available hardware in which too many criminals, lulled into believing that a simple password on a home or business computer was security enough to protect them from prying eyes, yielded an additional means through wh
ich to harvest evidence for prosecution. And CID in particular was knocking on his door for assistance with increasing regularity.
A man with designer stubble and designer glasses looked up from an assortment of electrical bits and pieces that would have had Romney reaching for a dustpan and brush.
‘Afternoon, Inspector. Always a pleasure.’
‘Hello, Adrian,’ said Romney. ‘Don’t you miss the real world stuck down here?’
‘If what you bring me to look at is typical of what goes on in the real world, I’ll settle for something a little more virtual, thank you.’
He led them through to a bench where the computers of Roper and Park were set up. ‘Whoever these belong to are in need of some sort of counselling, if you ask me.’
‘We’re not,’ said Romney, in a not unfriendly tone. ‘What have you found?’
‘Some disturbing images and Internet activity. The hard drives of both have some pretty horrific hard-core porn files downloaded on to them. S&M mostly, quite specialised. Certainly not your average porn sites. You’d need to know where to look to get access to some of this stuff. Internet histories show a lot of common portals accessed in similar time frames.’
‘So you think that they might have been exchanging information?’
‘Undoubtedly. What they’ve been accessing is too random, common to both and obscure to be attributed to haphazard Internet browsing. I haven’t had the time to access their email servers yet, but my bet is that we would find that’s the source of their common viewing.’
Romney breathed out heavily and checked his watch. ‘What did you want me to see?’
‘This file is common to both computer hard drives. It’s downloaded from a Russian website. It’s quite disturbing, I should warn you.’
‘Just play it,’ said Romney.
It was high quality footage in respect of its technological considerations. The subject matter, however, reflected the lowest qualities of Man’s perverted imaginings and actions. It was filmed using a hand-held camera, probably just one, and the cameraman used his artistic licence throughout to pan and sweep and zoom and tease. The photography gave the production an added dimension of realism, although it didn’t need it. There was no doubting that the violence was genuine.
The scene opened with a woman being dragged shouting and screaming into a room in which four men – big men in comparison to her small frame – were standing. The room was dimly lit from a central, bare bulb and, apart from a table in its centre, was without furniture. The men wore masks. The woman’s hands were bound in front of her. She had a sack over her head tied at her neck. The men were all fully clothed in similar drab military uniforms that looked genuine, but of low quality. Romney was minded of the armies of eastern Europe. The woman, who screamed and shrieked constantly and unintelligibly in a foreign language wore the clichéd clothing of a country peasant. She kicked out blindly at her captors who seemed to delight in her confusion, panic, distress and helplessness. The men dodged in and out for a few minutes poking, goading and shoving her. Once she fell to howls of laughter, but was quickly on her feet again and lashing out. One of her kicks caught one of the men in the shin. It looked real and painful. This impression was reinforced by his reaction. He shouted and hobbled out of range to the guffaws of his confederates. He was back in seconds with a clout to the side of her head that, with its power and surprise, sent her reeling into a wall with force.
Romney was no stranger to violence of the Hollywood action films. He’d witnessed it on CCTV and in the flesh as part of his job. He knew real violence when he saw it. Real violence couldn’t be faked. He realised that what he was watching was real violence and he began to feel physically sick.
She was slower to right herself. The combination of her wild lunges and the blow were exhausting and subduing her. From the laboured heaving of her chest it could be understood that the oxygen in the thick hood was proving harder and harder to find.
Another man reached for her shirt and ripped a large section of it from her. She rounded in his direction only to have another behind her grab a fistful of her billowing skirt and yank it. It unbalanced her and she fell again. He came away with flap of it. He held it aloft as a trophy to the cheer of his comrades. From here it turned to a game. She would dodge and screech and flail; they would grab and pull and yank and cheer and slowly she was stripped down to her underwear. Her tears and sobs of frustration were coming hard and fast. If she had been in any doubt of her fate, that was clearly being eroded.
At a signal two of them grabbed her and held her tightly. Another moved in and the blade of a knife flashed in the borrowed light. When he stepped back she was completely naked apart from her ankle boots. He held her underwear aloft and there was more cheering. Romney’s eye was drawn to the thick thatch of dark pubic hair that she now attempted to cover with her bound hands.
Until she was naked it had been difficult to guess at her age with any confidence Romney realised. Now that she was exposed fully, he guessed her to be between twenty and thirty, possibly a couple of years either side.
When she fell to her knees, he reached over and stopped it. The cessation of the animal noises left a disturbing quiet in the room. He looked at the timer for the film. It had taken less than five minutes for him to go from businesslike and focussed to utterly sickened.
Romney said, ‘Have you seen it through?’
‘Yes,’ answered the technician. ‘I would rather not have done, but that, unfortunately, is part of my job.’
‘What happens?’
‘They throw her on the table, hold her down between them and take it in turns to rape her. Then they stand around her broken body and pose for a final shot, much like men do when they’ve bravely reeled in a big fish. The film stops after that. I have no idea what happened to the woman.’
‘Do you have any idea of the films origins, or its authenticity?’
‘I can only guess, but this looks the real article to me. Whoever staged it was aiming at what’s known in the trade as vintage pornography, but the quality of the production and the film suggests something much more recent. It strikes me as a fantasy being lived out rather than a war crime, which is what it’s tipping its hat at.’
‘And this is on both of the computers’ hard-drives?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you say when it was downloaded?’
The technician clicked the mouse a few times. ‘Two months ago on this one.’ He moved to the other computer. ‘And the same for this. Same date actually.’
‘And there’re more?’
‘There are.’
‘Right. Thanks. Keep working on the email access. If you have any joy let me know immediately.’
As they walked back upstairs Romney patted his pockets for cigarettes, but found none. ‘Come outside for a minute,’ he said to Marsh. ‘I need a smoke and a think.’
He scrounged a cigarette from the desk sergeant and they found some shelter from the cold wind in the smoking area. Romney inhaled deeply and said, ‘That was grim.’ He let go of the lungful of smoke turning the air around him white. ‘You all right?’
Marsh smiled sadly. ‘Yes, thanks. I’m not sorry you stopped it though.’
Romney studied the building opposite for a minute in the grey light of the day. ‘Things have changed, haven’t they?’
‘How do you mean, sir?’
‘I wanted Park in custody while I worked on Roper. I’m as sure as I can be without knowing it that Roper is going to prove the source of the sample that was taken from Goddard. If he were alive we would have had some manoeuvring room, some leverage. We would have had Park as well. As it is all we have is supposition, suspicion, opportunity and motive. It’s not enough. It’s what the CPS call insufficient evidence. If we could get him to trial, I could see him getting off. I don’t want that. I’m sure none of us does.’
‘So what do we do? Let him go?’
‘Maybe. If it’s not cast-iron. I can’t risk it.’
> ‘Sorry, sir, but that’s crazy. We’ve got to try him on it.’
Romney was still engrossed in the front of the building opposite. A banner had been hanging there in the summer months. Like much of the temporary cosmetic face of Dover, it had soon succumbed to the autumnal gales and rain and the freezing winter had all but finished it off. There was still evidence of its existence, though. A lengthy thin cord dangled and bucked in the breeze. It caught Romney’s attention. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to be cleverer than that. I’ve underestimated Park. Fool me once and all that. We’ve got to give him enough rope.’
‘Sir?’
‘I know. I’m not making much sense am I? Never mind. Let’s get inside and face the music.’ He stubbed the cigarette out in the bucket of sand provided for the purpose and re-entered the building. He told Marsh to go down and convey his apologies for the delay to Park and his solicitor. ‘Be nice. Be text-book polite. Tell them anything you like, but make it sound convincing and important. I’m going to talk to the super for a minute. I’ll see you down there.’
***
13
Twenty minutes later Romney entered the interview room to conduct what he knew was going to be a pointless interrogation. He looked tired and deflated and as though some of the fight had been knocked out of him.
‘I hope that Sergeant Marsh explained my delay,’ he said, looking down at a file he had opened in front of him. The duty solicitor nodded. Romney looked up and snared Park’s eyes with his own. He held them until the youth looked away.
The solicitor broke the silence. ‘My client would like it stated for the audio record that he has attended the police station of his own free will in response to it becoming known to him that the police wished to speak with him.’
‘Very public spirited, I’m sure,’ said Romney.
‘Also, for the record, my client would like it noted that this is the second time in two days that he has been asked to attend interviews voluntarily. There has also been substantial delay.’
